Young people are taking the first steps towards being reunited with their parents after years of being in the care system, fewer families are falling into crisis and foster placements are being saved from breakdown, following a new way of delivering social work in the London borough of Sutton.
The council is adopting restorative practice in its children’s service as part of a wider transformation programme that began last May, which includes the introduction of multi-agency locality teams and an increased early help offer.
Sarah McCarrison, assistant team manager on the looked-after children team, believes the reforms make her a better social worker. “I think the principles of restorative practice are best practice, and what we should all be doing as social workers. Social work has had quite a professional head on it in recent years, but this is about reducing the gap between the professional and the family, and how we can work alongside our young people and families on this journey of positive change.” And she adds: “If we, as social workers, don’t engage with families on a level that is meaningful for them, it’s a redundant role.”
So far, around 280 staff – social workers, support workers and staff from partner agencies – have been trained in this new way of practice that gives families the power to identify their own strengths and help create solutions to keep the family together. The practice is being embedded across all teams, including early help, where “restorative family coach” roles have been implemented to support families before they reach crisis.
Angela Killalea, Sutton’s principal social worker and restorative practice lead, says: “In recent years, social work has been a lot about box-ticking and form-filling – we wanted to move away from this.”
The positive signs of this new way of working are already starting to appear. “We’ve had cases of young people leaving care who are 19 or 20 and are now going back home – restorative practice has helped them to rebuild those family relationships. In other cases, we have been able to reduce the number of children going into care following family breakdowns.” McCarrison says the approach is preventing foster placements from breaking down. “Before, we would have focused on the incident and the behaviour that caused the potential breakdown,” she says. “But now we start by looking at the things that are working in the relationship and the benefits.” The incident is not forgotten, but is put in context. “In one case, the carer decided they needed to treat the incident as a one-off, and the placement did not need to end.”
So what makes restorative practice so different from traditional social work?
Killalea accepts that the differences are quite subtle: “In the past, families haven’t always had a voice in the process – this is giving them the reins rather than us being the expert and telling them what they should be doing.”
Communication and relationships are key. “We have to be able to listen to what our families need and what they want from us. It’s about getting them to think about what they have tried and what hasn’t worked; what their resources are in terms of family and friends.”
Sutton is not the first children’s service to adopt restorative practice, but is unique in London and the South East in terms of developing its own Restorative Justice council-accredited training programmes and embedding restorative principles across all parts of the service. It has introduced “restorative supervision” to create a climate where social workers can speak openly about the stresses of the day. Thereare also monthly “restorative group supervision” sessions, facilitated by child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) psychologists. Killalea says the move to adopt restorative practice principles across the service was an obvious step for the “good” outer London authority, which was praised by Ofsted inspectors for being “uncompromising in its focus on improving the quality of frontline social work”.
Killalea explains: “For us, restorative practice is not just part of our toolkit when working with families. We realised that if we were working that way with our families, then it was key that we work that way with each other and our partners as well – that, as staff, it’s OK to question and challenge. We wanted to create a space for workers to be able to offload the emotional stresses of their work and not get burnt out.” McCarrison agrees: “A lot of the work we do with children involves trauma. Restorative practice has allowed social workers to say that they have had a bad day and need to talk, which means, as managers, we are in a better position to support them.”
Feedback from social workers about the reforms has been encouraging. “I am constantly surprised at how positive the feedback has been – it’s as if a lightbulb has been turned on,” says Killalea. “My hope is that, as we embed restorative practice fully, there will be a different feel to Sutton. I hope it will give us a different identity – one where our service users feel valued, listened to and respected.”
